Thursday, 30 October 2014

We need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.

There cannot be a "free" market, but not in drugs (or prostitution, or pornography).

Michael Meacher writes:The Tory government’s decision to
withdraw from the search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean where tens of
thousands of refugees are fleeing their war-savaged homelands is an act of
pitiless inhumanity. Already this year alone some 25,000 people have arrived in
Italy, and similar numbers from Eritrea, with thousands more from Iraq, Nigeria
and Somalia.The numbers who never got there and drowned on the way are not
known, but they certainly run into thousands.To
back out of this humanitarian mission is callous and despicable, especially
when the motive is plainly to compete with Ukip in being hostile and harsh to
migrants.It is made even worse when the Home Secretary hides behind the
disingenuous pretext that saving lives only encourages more persons to risk
this treacherous escape route.It is a shameful indictment to Britain’s
reputation as a haven to the persecuted that the UK has resettled less than a
tenth of the number of Syrians taken by Germany and Sweden and is now washing its
hands of a fundamental humanitarian duty.Tragically this hard-heartedness
has also been played out across the whole spectrum of domestic policies too.It
is displayed in sanctioning – now affecting a million persons a year – whereby
a recipient of job-seeker’s allowance or employment and support allowance have
their allowance withdrawn in full if, for example, they are 5 minutes late for
a job interview or are in hospital when they’re supposed to be on a work
programme.And for a second infringement they’re deprived of all their income
for 3 months, and for a third the loss extends to 3 years!No wonder so many are forced to
steal, especially when they have dependants, and then are given a fine which
they cannot pay when they only stole because they had no money in the first
place.It even leads to the penniless deliberately stealing expensive items
because then they’re sentenced to a few months in a warm cell and are fed 3
meals a day.Then there are the further million a year – not the same people,
but with some overlap – who are forced to use foodbanks.Plus the hundreds of
thousands of disabled people subjected to flimsy work capability assessments
and signed off as capable of work, which often their GPs deny, with a halving
or more of their benefit – supported by the Tory welfare minister, the
ineffable Lord Freud, who told us the disabled weren’t worth £2 an hour anyway,
and that the spread of hundreds of food banks was because people liked a free
meal.Then there is the freezing of pay
for public sector workers (when MPs are being offered an 11% rise by Ipsa), the
extension of the waiting days (before any benefit is paid) from 3 to 7 days
implemented last Monday, the housing benefit cap, the increase in social rents
to private rent levels, the bedroom tax, and on and on it goes.Most of these
impositions will save little money and make a minuscule contribution to paying
down the deficit.But what they all share is a gratuitously punitive attitude
towards to the poor and downtrodden.Inhumanity is now the defining
characteristic of this Tory government, and Labour should nail this on their
electoral coffin.

Austerity
has hit the poorest hardest, increasing inequality and poverty. Homelessness is
up under this government and nearly a million families needed to use food banks
last year.These horrific trends are set to intensify in the next
parliament whatever form the government takes, with Labour signed up to
Coalition spending plans in year one and promising further austerity to balance
the books by 2020.It is in this grim political context that Class will be
meetingon Saturday to discuss ‘What Britain Needs’.Austerity won’t balance the books, as George Osborne is
currently finding, because the books can’t be balanced on the backs of the poor
– austerity will only inflict more pain.Any serious economic analysis is not a necessary part of
the austerity agenda. It is simply the cover for implementing a ruthless free
market agenda that would not otherwise be possible.Part of achieving that
agenda has necessitated shifting the debate from one about inequality,
unaccountable and deregulated financial institutions to the alleged flaws in
the public sector and the people who rely upon it.The logic is inescapable.If you concede the ground on
austerity, as Labour has, then as sure as night follows day you must capitulate
too on scapegoating the poorest and least electorally potent.Any political
party seeking to impose austerity on the scale envisaged will seek to justify
its attacks – and that inevitably leads to the demonisation of those on
austerity’s receiving end.With no structural analysis of the UK’s economic failure
and continued fragility, politicians offer no structural solutions. Instead
they pander to the simple politics of hate.Tory minister Michael Fallon
mis-speaks about our towns being “swamped” and “under siege”, while Labour’s
frontbenchers have, even in this Parliament, described people on welfare as
“shirkers” – a language echoed and magnified by the Conservatives.But it is UKIP which articulates this agenda in its crudest
form – blaming the EU, migrants, and welfare recipients with visceral divisive
and dishonest attacks.Their propagandist rhetoric goes further than the other
parties and so they are seen by those who have been duped by the narrative as
being the more genuine.While the Conservatives and even Labour say it, UKIP
really means it. They appear authentic, the others like they are simply trying
to buy votes.When David Cameron described UKIP as “a bunch of
fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” in 2006, he did not foresee that he
would be talking up migration and welfare as the problem, to distract people
from his dismal economic performance and the privatisation and cuts in the
public sector.Cameron has unleashed a political force that more authentically
articulates the concerns he espouses. His achievement in shifting the political
debate post-crisis is now his Achilles heel.New Labour tried the same tactics and it ended similarly
badly. Rather than confront prejudice and ignorance it often sought to harness
it for electoral gain.David Blunkett as Home Secretary talked about the UK being
“swamped”, he never claimed to have mis-spoken and this week backed Fallon’s
use of the term.Similarly, James Purnell ratcheted up the rhetoric on welfare
claimants.All they did was shift the debate onto the Tories’ agenda.Austerity not only drives the growing inequality in our
society, it drives the divisiveness that demonises the migrant, the welfare
claimant or the public sector worker.This cynical, cowardly and dishonest
politics is the reason why so few have any faith in our political class.

The Class conferenceon Saturdaywill be about building a positive
vision of a better society for all, shifting the political debate from one of
hate and fear to one of solidarity and hope.

Fresh starts are great, aren't they? They fill you with
hope for a better future.

So it’s wonderful that we have a new European
Commission coming in, especially one that is avowedlycommitted to greater transparencyabout the revolving door between EU
politics and big business.

This
is good news especially in light of recent fears about the transparency of
arguably the Commission’s greatest task ahead – the negotiation of the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

However just
as you begin to feel the faintest stirrings of hope something comes along which
quite simply knocks you down and makes the terms "European
Commission" and "transparency" about as likely bedfellows as
Nigel Farage and an Afghan kitchen with HIV.

I’m referring
to the appointment of former oil baron Miguel Arias Cañete as the new European
Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy.

That’s right, in case you’re
worried one of your colleagues spiked your coffee, you did read those words
correctly - a former oil baron, dubbed by the The Times ‘Senor Petrolhead’, has
been put in charge of sorting out climate change.

Cañete was the president of two companies handling
petroleum supply in Spain.

What was that
about the new Commission and a commitment to greater transparency about
revolving door politics?

When Cañete
became the Spanish minister for agriculture and the environment in 2011, he
immediately enacted reforms to the Spanish coastal law.

Cañete had links to
real estate and construction companies which could benefit from the reforms –
he was a former board member of one, his wife the sole representative of
another and his brother-in-law was the president of the national cement
manufacturer’s association!

Don’t check that coffee, this is all still reality.

Cañete’s
political path is as littered with potential conflicts of interest as a shark
on lifeguard duty.

In his time as a member of the European Parliament between
1988 and 1999 Cañete sat on the Agricultural and Rural Development Committee
where he fought for the inclusion of bull breeding in the list of agricultural
activities that receive payments from the EU.

His wife, Micaela Domecq Solís,
is the heiress and co-owner of a bull breeding business.

New commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and
Fisheries, Karmenu Vella, has been a member of the Maltese parliament since
1976, a period of time which saw UK gambling company, Betfair, granted its
first overseas licence in Malta.

The EU has a long
history of revolving door politics, reaching perhaps its hallucinatory peak in
2013 when the Commission re-appointed an ex-EU official turned lawyer for Big
Tobacco – someone who had already been through the revolving door –to head its
ethical committee advisingon…
guess what?... that’s right, revolving door reforms.

Or was that the peak?

Maybe it’s
just the coffee we drink nowadays or maybe we’re peaking right now with a new
Commission that is supposedly dedicated to greater transparency but which
contains a handful of Commissioners who could just as easily be viewed as
insider lobbyists for big business than as disinterested politicians.

Sometimes it’s easy to allow yourself to think that
Malthusianism, the idea that human populations grow like a virus devouring the
earth, is only the preserve of buffoons like birdwatcher Bill Oddie and the
Duke of Edinburgh.

The press and
social-media users met Oddie’s statement with the ridicule it deserved.

And
back in 1988,Prince Philipwas
similarly lampooned when he said he hoped to be reincarnated as a lethal virus
so that he could kill off some of the glut of humanity.But something comes along every now
and then to show that such odious ideas are not confined to the ramblings of
clueless old cranks like Bill and Phil.This week, the Malthusians once again
reared their ugly baby-hating heads with anew studypublished
by two professors, hailing from the largely unpopulated country of Australia.Even by the standards of apocalyptic, Malthusian scaremongering, this report
was something special.Professor Corey Bradshaw of the
University of Adelaide and Professor Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania,
who both specialise in studying animal populations, argue in the report that
the ‘growing and over-consuming human population, especially the increasing
affluent component, is rapidly eroding many of the Earth’s natural ecosystems’.They see many positive social developments as major problems, namely longer
life expectancies, lower infant-mortality rates and increased living standards.They argue that these have put an incredible strain on resources and that, if humans
are anything like every other species on earth, we’re heading for trouble,
perhaps even extinction.The panicked tone of the report was reflected in some
of the coverage, with a write-up in theGuardianstating: ‘Bringing children into the
world is an act of such environmental destructiveness that it requires
mitigating.’In his 1992 book,The Intellectuals and the Masses,
John Carey outlined how the aloof, intellectual elite has fantasised about
world wars and global pandemics coming along to thin the herd since the
Victorian era. However, this new study warns that even if such Malthusian
fantasies were to come true they would do little to slow down the ‘inexorable’
growth of humanity.The authors also lament that even a globally enforced
one-child policy would do little to stabilise human populations before the end
of the twenty-first century.Their answer to this perceived problem is to
attack humanity on all fronts: female fertility must be curtailed globally,
they argue, and for those of us already born, we must rein in our consumption
habits.They believe this will lead to ‘hundreds of millions fewer people to
feed’ by the end of this century.Like so many Malthusians before
them, Bradshaw and Brook mistake the problem of underdevelopment for the
problem of overpopulation.As has beenpointed out elsewhere,
media coverage of overpopulation in the West is often adorned with images of
foreign-looking poor people in very cramped environments.Pictures of people
clinging to clapped-out, overcrowded trains are particularly popular. Such
images show perfectly the flawed logic of population panickers.When a
Malthus-minded individual looks at such an image they see too many people, not
too few trains. And so it goes with the Australian professors’ desire to have
‘hundreds of millions fewer people to feed’.They do not see the problem of
food shortages in some parts of the world as a problem of implementing the
development necessary for a modern economy and modern agriculture, but rather
one of too many mouths to feed.

Followers of Malthus, like members of a doomsday cult, have
predicted the end of civilisation every generation for two centuries, only to
be disappointed every time.

Far from there being impending mass starvation, in
reality things are getting better for the vast majority of human beings.

Today,
the kind of cataclysm Malthusians have always predicted seems less likely than
ever before.

Despite massive growth in human population in recent decades, the
standard of living for the world’s poorest peoplehas been rising.

In
1981, half of all people living in the developing world lived in absolute
poverty; in 2010 it was 21 per cent and falling.

This is despite a 59 per cent
population increase in the same regions over the same period. In other words,
more people have not led to more hunger.Observations of the animal kingdom
can tell us little about the future of humans. The misapplication of theories
used for monitoring animal populations to humans is why Malthus’ predictions
about societal breakdown have never come true.The approach fails to take into
account the fact that, unlike animals, humans have a far greater ability to
adapt to their circumstances and produce what they need themselves, using an
ingenuity that no other species on earth possesses.While the population of
monkeys on an island may grow to a point where there is not enough fruit to
feed them all, this is unlikely to happen to human populations spread across
continents that can produce or import more of what they need and no longer have
to rely on the fickle beneficence of nature.And through ever-more ingenuity
and invention we can increase productivity, creating new resources as we go to
provide for the exponentially growing population that Malthusians so fear.The growth of humanity is not
something to be feared, but something to be celebrated.More people means more
minds, more ingenuity, more creativity to deal with any problem that humanity
may face.Far from being to our detriment, population growth has accelerated
human progress.Malthusians do not see this; they do not see that the mass of
humanity is made up of individuals, each with something different to offer the
world. Instead they see a virus whose only purpose is to consume and reproduce.It’s time to reassert a more positive view of humanity.

The Afghan invasion launched what would become the west’s
war without end, encompassing the catastrophe of Iraq, drone wars from Pakistan
to Somalia, covert support for jihadi rebels in Syria and “humanitarian”
intervention in Libya that has left behind a failed state in the grip of civil
war.The Middle East is now in an unparalleled and unprecedented
crisis.More than any other single factor, that is the product of continual US
and western intervention and support for dictatorships, both before and after
the “Arab spring”, unconstrained by any system of international power or law.

But if the Middle Eastern
maelstrom is the fruit of a US-dominated new world order, Ukraine is a result
ofthe challenge to the unipolar world that
grew out of the failure of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.It was the
attempt to draw divided Ukraine into the western camp by EU and US hawks after
years of eastward Nato expansion that triggered the crisis, Russia’s absorption
of Crimea and the uprising in the Russian-speaking Donbass region of the east.Eight months on, elections on
both sides look likely to deepen the division of the country.Routinely
dismissed as Kremlin propaganda, the reality is the US and EU backed the
violent overthrow of an elected if corrupt government and are now supporting a
military campaign that includesfar-right militias accused of war crimes— while Russia is subject to sweeping
US and EU sanctions.Last week at the Valdai
discussion club near Sochi, Russia’s president, VladimirPutin, launched his fiercest denunciationyet of this US role in the world –
perhaps not surprisingly after Barack Obama had bracketed Russia with Ebola and
Isis as America’s top three global threats.After the cold war, Putin declared,
the US had tried to dominate the world through “unilateral diktat” and “illegal
intervention”, disregarding international law and institutions if they got in
the way.The result had been conflict, insecurity and the rise of groups such
as Isis, as the US and its allies were “constantly fighting the consequences of
their own policies”.

None of which is very
controversial across most of the world.During a Valdai club session I chaired,Putin told foreign journalists and
academics that the
unipolar world had been a “means of justifying dictatorship over people and
countries” – but the emerging multipolar world was likely to be still more
unstable.The only answer – andthis was clearly intended as an opening to
the west– was to
rebuild international institutions, based on mutual respect and co-operation.The choice was new rules – or no rules, which would lead to “global anarchy”.WhenI asked Putin whether Russia’s actions in Ukraine had
been a response to, and an example of, a “no-rules order”, Putin
denied it, insisting that the Kosovo precedent meant Crimea had every right to
self-determination.But by conceding that Russian troops had intervened in
Crimea “to block Ukrainian units”, he effectively admitted crossing the line of
legality – even if not remotely on the scale of the illegal invasions, bombing
campaigns and covert interventions by the US and its allies over the past
decade and a half.But there is little chance of the western camp responding
to Putin’s call for a new system of global rules.In fact, the US showed little
respect for rules during the cold war either, intervening relentlessly wherever
it could.But it did have respect for power. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, that restraint disappeared.It was only the failure of the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq – and Russia’s subsequent challenge to western expansion
and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine – that provided some check to
unbridled US power.Along with the rise of China, it has also created some
space for other parts of the world to carve out their political independence,
notably in Latin America.Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much
global appeal, but Russia’s role as a counterweight to western supremacism
certainly does.Which is why much of the world has a different view of events
in Ukraine from the western orthodoxy – and why China, India, Brazil and South
Africa all abstained from the condemnation of Russia over Crimea at the UN
earlier this year.But Moscow’s check on US military
might is limited. Its economy is over-dependent on oil and gas, under-invested
and now subject to disabling sanctions.Only China offers the eventual prospect
of a global restraint on western unilateral power and that is still some way
off.

As Putin is said to have told the US
vice-president, Joe Biden, Russia may not be strong enough to
compete for global leadership, but could yet decide who that leader might be.Even Obama still regularly insists that the US is the
“indispensable nation”.And it seems almost certain that whoever takes over
from Obama will be significantly more hawkish and interventionist.The US elite
remains committed to global domination and whatever can be preserved of the
post-1991 new world order.Despite the benefits of the emerging multipolar world,
the danger of conflict, including large-scale wars, looks likely to grow.The
public pressure that brought western troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan is
going to have to get far stronger in the years to come – if that threat is not
to engulf us all.

Two political parties exist specifically in order to provide
the Government of the United Kingdom. They are organised to that end.

Other parties, and we Independents, have a different role.

The failure of the present electoral arrangements to take
account of this distinction looks likely to be thrown into sharp relief next
May. A Bill needs to be introduced in the first Queen’s Speech of the next
Parliament.

It would need to be made clear from the very start that the
Parliament Act would be invoked if necessary, and that there would be
absolutely no question of a referendum.

The United Kingdom would be divided 300 constituencies, each
containing as near as possible to one third of one per cent of the electorate,
with the requirement that constituency boundaries straddle the United Kingdom’s
internal borders wherever possible.

Each constituency would return three Constituency MPs.

On the first Thursday of a month-long process, it being quite
a recent phenomenon that a General Election was held on one day everywhere,
each constituency would elect two MPs.

The Labour Party and the Conservative Party would submit
their respective internal shortlists of two to run-off ballots of the entire
constituency electorate.

On the second Thursday, there would be a contest between the
previous week’s Labour loser and the previous week’s Conservative loser.

One may, and people do, join both of those parties in
Northern Ireland. They probably ought not to contest Assembly elections there,
but that is something else.

On the third Thursday, each of the 99 lieutenancy areas would
elect two County MPs, one from between two candidates submitted jointly by the
Co-operative and Labour Parties, and one from between two candidates submitted
by the Conservative Party.

And on the fourth Thursday, each of the 12 European
Parliamentary regions would elect 12 Area MPs, six from lists submitted by
other parties and six Independents, with each elector voting for one party list
and for one Independent candidate, and with the highest scoring six in each category
being elected.

Parties that chose to contest these seats would not be
eligible to contest any other election.

This would give a total of 642 MPs.

This system would give a voice to smaller parties and to
Independent candidates from all parts of the country.

It would give everyone direct representation within both the
governing party and the Official Opposition. It would give the two main parties
direct representative responsibility for every community.

Simultaneously, it would guarantee that there would always be
either a Labour or a Conservative majority government. Only the extreme
unlikelihood of a dead heat would ever deliver a hung Parliament.

The lowering of the voting age to 16 might also be included
in this, although with the strict conditions that under-18s (indeed, under-21s,
and perhaps even slightly older people) would be ineligible to serve on juries.

Far more urgently, there is the need to reduce the
parliamentary term to four years, or, as would be even better, to abolish the
fixed term altogether.

Even the finest political
insights congeal into received wisdom over time. Then they rot into banality.

When James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, first pinned a
reminder in his office to focus on, among other things,“the economy, stupid,”he could not have known that this
morsel would still be reheated and served up on Westminster menus 22 years
later.Carville’s aide-memoire gets an outing whenever
politicians are losing an argument about something that isn’t the economy
and want to pretend it doesn’t matter. It’s the first commandment: thou shalt
have no other issues before me.It’s what senior Labour people
were saying at the start of their conference, when the Tories were broadsiding
them with demands for English votes for English laws in parliament.Let Cameron
waste his ammunition on theWest Lothian question, Ed
Miliband’s aides said. The voters want to hear us talk about the scourge of low
pay.Carville’s dictum also comes out when the Tories face
Labour accusations that they can’t be trusted with the NHS.The riposte is that
the health service needs money that can only be generated in a growing economy,
for which only Conservatives have a credible plan.So really, it’s the economy,
stupid.Obviously voters will tend to prefer a party
that secures their financial interests. Or, more precisely, they will
avoid one if they think it might ruin them.But that doesn’t help a leader
build a winning campaign if no one can agree on which part of the economy it
really is, stupid.For the Tories, budget discipline
is paramount.They have successfully written their version of events into the
national economic story, with the first test of a sound government set as its
stomach for austerity.This isn’t quite the same as success in reducing the
deficit or national debt, on which measures George Osborne’s record is flimsy.

Government borrowing in Septemberwas £1.6bn higher than the previous
year. The chancellor gets away with it because so few people think Ed Balls
would have done a better job.Miliband’s hopes instead rest on
polling in which voters say they are unimpressed by a recovery that isn’t
showing up in their payslips.The Treasury insists this is a standard feature
of the post-recession landscape and that wages will pick up.

Miliband says it is a deep structural flaw
in the economythat,
if unaddressed, will blight the prospects of British workers for a generation.“We’ll hammer the Tories on wages,” a Labour strategist told me earlier this
year, although so far the attack has had all the impact of an occasional
prodding with a foam mallet.Downing Street takes comfort from opinion polls that put
Cameron and Osborne well ahead of Miliband and Balls on who is better trusted
to run the economy, but, given the double-digit scale of that advantage, the
question really ought to be why the Tories aren’t also miles ahead in party
preference.One explanation, put forward by Tory liberals, is that Cameron has
been dragged off course by his party’s rebellious Eurosceptic fringe and sucked
into an unwinnable anti-immigration arms race with Ukip, when he needs to get
back to the economy.Conservative strategists say he will do just that when the
time is right.Treasury attack dossiers are being compiled to show that Labour
numbers don’t add up. Accommodating business leaders will be lined up to warn
of the perils of wealth-crushing “Red Ed” leftism.The one explanation for polling stagnation you never hear
from Tories is that Miliband’s account of a recovery that bypasses the majority
may just be right.The ineffectiveness of Labour’s campaign doesn’t disprove
the analysis that underpins it.There are many reasons for the
growth of Ukip support, but surely a big one is resentment at the unfair
allocations of reward in the boom years, and pain after the bust.You don’t have
to be a card-carrying Marxist to see that a crisis of confidence in the
political establishment may have its roots in economic dysfunction.Cameron
himself came close in 2009, when hewent to the World Economic Forum in Davos
and warned of “markets without morality”, “wealth without fairness”,
“a disconnection between capitalism and people’s lives”.But that was a different Cameron incarnation.This was
around the time that he was talking about the “big society” as a civic,
voluntary alternative to state intervention.The idea flopped and the phrase is
now banished from the Tory lexicon.It wouldn’t in any case look very
appetising suddenly regurgitating five years later, but the insight that lay
behind it was sound.Elections are never won by a kind of crass Carvillism –
the view that voter behaviour tracks national economic indicators – and
certainly not by Conservatives who must always battle the perception that they
accept social decay as a price worth paying to balance the books.Notably, in 2012 Carville himself
revisited the old slogan in a book –It’s the Middle Class, Stupid– arguing that the new electoral
battleground was insecurity and income stagnation, which rob mainstream America
of attainable dreams of a more prosperous future.The book was co-authored with
Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster, who has also advised Miliband.Tory majorities from Macmillan
to Major have been won when enough voters feel the party offers them
ladders to climb, removing obstacles to their advancement into an expanding
middle class.Cameron sometimes talks in those terms. He fiddles around
the margins of unequal opportunity –offering
soft loans for first-time property-buyers, for example.But his
favours have been more conspicuously bestowed on people for whom the great
recession was an minor inconvenience, or no inconvenience at all.The Tory quandary is all the more severe now that British
politics has fragmented into a multiparty melee. Labour’s share of the vote is
shrinking, but Cameron is not yet the beneficiary.He may be cooking up a
campaign to crush Miliband, but his isn’t the only restaurant in town and it
has been serving up the same economic argument for nearly five years.If
voters are turning up their noses, it could be because they aren’t stupid.

Ha-Joon
Chang in The Guardianis
right that “the country is in desperate
need of a counter narrative” to the Tory story on the economy.I believe it
should go like this.

First,
Labour did not leave behind an economic mess; the bankers did.

Labour was not
profligate: the biggest Labour deficit in the pre-crash years was 3.3% of GDP;
the Thatcher-Major governments racked up deficits bigger than that in 10 of
their 18 years.

So who was the profligate? It’s a no-brainer.

Second, the Tories have claimed
that the reason for enforced austerity is to pay down the deficit.

Yet, after
six years of falling wages, private investment flat, productivity on the floor,
and fast-rising trade deficits, the deficit is £100bn, when Osborne promised in
2010 it would now be next to zero.

To cap it all, the deficit will almost
certainly rise this year because income from taxes has sharply fallen as wages
are increasingly squeezed.

Austerity is now a busted policy that has turned
toxic. It should be dropped.

Third, Osborne’s so-called
recovery is bogus because it is too dependent on a housing asset bubble, too
dependent on financial services rather than manufacturing, and has no demand to
sustain it.

It is already fading as growth slows.

Fourth, the only way now to get
the deficit down is by public investment to kickstart sustainable growth via
housebuilding, upgrading infrastructure, and greening the economy.

Funding a
£30bn package at interest rates of £150m a year would create 1.5m jobs within
two/three years.

Or it could be financed without any increase in public
borrowing by printing money, or instructing the publicly owned banks to
concentrate lending on British industry, or taxing the 0.1% ultra-rich whose
wealth has doubled since the crash.

People need hope.

The Tories are
continuing with austerity because their real motive is to shrink the state and
public services, not to cut the deficit.

The alternative offers investment
desperately needed, growth in the real economy, genuine jobs, rising wages –
and really will pay down the deficit.

“How can anyone be confident that the global security environment
will not change in the next 10 years? This is not the time to be letting our
guard down.”

Despite these appeals to vagueness, the continuation and
replacement of Trident is likely to face challenge on at least two fronts.

Firstly, Scotland does not seem to like nuclear weapons.
The latest British Social Attitudes reportshows
at least the balance of opinion in Scotland is opposed to UK nukes.

Plans to
replace Trident, which assume its basing at a facility on the estuary of the
River Clyde, will continue to be politically contentious in Scotland and may be
impossible to accomplish in the event of another independence referendum (in,
say, 10 to 20 years).

Secondly,
many non-weapon states are impatient with our phallic exhibitionism.

Last week,
over 155 states released astatementexpressing their ‘deep concern’ about
the ‘the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons’.

These states are being encouraged by a group of NGOs, such
as the ICRC, ICAN and Article 36, whom believe a treaty (similar to the cluster
munitions ban) could be developed to outlaw nuclear weapons.

Such a move would
be tricky for the UK: a ban wouldnot require the
acquiescence of the nuclear-armed states but would have diplomatic, legal and
political effects on them.

Despite its commitment to Trident replacement, Labour’s
National Policy Forum (NPF) appears to acknowledge the possibility and even
value of such change in International Humanitarian Law. In its latest (and last
pre-election)report, the NPF
stated that Labour:

“… recognises the success of past international bans on weapons of
mass destruction such as landmines, cluster munitions, chemical and biological
weapons. The Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference 2015 will be a key moment for
a Labour Government to show leadership in achieving progress on global disarmament
and anti-proliferation measures.”

These developments imply Trident or its successor will face
challenge.

The
French Prime Minister has revived the idea that the French labour market is
overly protective of permanent employees. However, international comparisons
show that this is not the case, argues Duval Guillaume

, translated by Tom Gill:

“The functioning of the labour market is not satisfactory
because it is not creating enough jobs, it generates significant inequalities
between highly protected employees on permanent contracts and very precarious
workers on fixed term and agency contracts. We need to take action
on this.”

So
French prime minister Manuel Valls told France’s weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur on 22 October.That
the French economy is not creating enough jobs is unfortunately not in doubt, but contrary to what our Prime Minister
seems to think, this is much more to do with inappropriate macroeconomic policy
currently being pursued in France and Europe, combined with major structural
problems of the French economy such as education, innovation, and the access to
credit by companies than a supposed rigidity of the labour market.And it is
certainly not in any case down to the excessive protection of permanent
employees.Manuel Valls is of course right
to emphasize the very significant difficulties for casual workers in the labour
market, including ever shorter term contracts routinely offered to them.However, it is wrong to assume that when they are in employment, employees on
fixed-term contracts are less protected than permanent employees.

This is
exactly the opposite: fixed term contracts (CDD, Contract Durée Determinée)
offer significant protections in France.The
OECD is an institution that brings together the leading rich countries to
produce analysis and comparative statistics on major economic and social
issues.It takes a very neo-liberal stance on the labour market and we
really cannot imagine a particular fondness for the “French social model”.It regularly compares the laws
of all the rich countries and major emerging economies with respect to labour
market rigidity and protection against dismissal and provides a composite index
to measure this protection.Of all the countries it monitors, France is the
country where short-term contracts are the most protective of employees.This
is also probably not unconnected with the trend towards shorter fixed term
contracts offered by companies.But
Manuel Valls is especially wrong to consider that permanent employees (CDI,
ContractDuréeIndeterminée)in France are strongly
protected against dismissal (whether individual or collective dismissals).According to the OECD, French
permanent employees were certainly much better protected in 2013 than the
US and the UK, but they were barely better protected than in Denmark – which is
considered the ultimate in labour market flexibility, with their famous
flexicurity – and on par with Korea.And the French permanent workforce is
significantly less protected than in the currently fashionable Germany, despite
the Schröder reforms, and in the Netherlands which is also often seen as a
particularly strong model for the organization of the labour market.*Protections are also weaker than
in China and India, contrary to popular belief.In addition, these findings
date to before the entry into force of the so-called job security law adopted
in mid-2013, which further reduces barriers to collective redundancies.In short, there really is very
little to expect from these reforms, at least for those who are not blinded by
ideology and the employers propaganda.* All these countries, by the
way, enjoy significantly lower unemployment than France.